


the two of us are just young gods (and if you wanna go to heaven, you should fuck me tonight)

by thisismetrying



Series: but do you feel like a young god? [1]
Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Episode: s01e06 Adjournment, F/M, I Don't Even Know, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:40:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29326371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisismetrying/pseuds/thisismetrying
Summary: This chess is brutal. Analyzing each move, each potential move, and why not the other moves, each potential position, each vulnerability is like they’re performing an autopsy, unmasking the other players and their games one at a time.Chess is still beautiful to her, but in a different way. This type of chess is like a bruise, she thinks. It is a bruise that lays her skin bare, reminds her that she is just skin and bone. But somehow, she can’t help but run her fingers over it, the delicate flesh, until it smarts or the pain fades. And when she puts it up to the light, all she sees is a beautiful, mottled purple.Without the numbing effects of the pills and the drinks, she finds she likes it, the way this chess almost hurts.-or those five weeks in Benny's apartment
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Series: but do you feel like a young god? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2154105
Comments: 15
Kudos: 47





	the two of us are just young gods (and if you wanna go to heaven, you should fuck me tonight)

**Author's Note:**

> lyrics in italics and title from Halsey's "Young God"

_He says, "Oh, baby girl, don't get cut on my edges_ _  
I'm the king of everything and oh, my tongue is a weapon  
There's a light in the crack that's separating your thighs  
And if you wanna go to heaven you should fuck me tonight"_

-

New York is like a game of speed chess, always busy, always moving, with never enough time to think. The people are busy, an array of pawns and knights and bishops hustling past each other, sometimes knocking into each other, taking the other’s teeth out.

The city is like a pill, but instead of refurbishing Beth’s tranquility, it puts her on edge, makes her feel like a livewire, like her body is about to be burnt to a crisp by the neon lights.

But back in Benny’s apartment that is more concrete box than home, it’s different. It is a grandmaster game, every more painstakingly analyzed, studied, picked apart, like a burn scar with a scab over it that they just won’t leave alone.

-

This training is nothing like she’s ever done before, Benny warns her.

No, it’s not. Before, Beth thought chess was beautiful. Now, she sees it differently, in this lightless basement of an apartment.

This chess is brutal. Analyzing each move, each potential move, and why not the other moves, each potential position, each vulnerability is like they’re performing an autopsy, unmasking the other players and their games one at a time.

Chess is still beautiful to her, but in a different way. This type of chess is like a bruise, she thinks. It is a bruise that lays her skin bare, reminds her that she is just skin and bone. But somehow, she can’t help but run her fingers over it, the delicate flesh, until it smarts or the pain fades. And when she puts it up to the light, all she sees is a beautiful, mottled purple.

Without the numbing effects of the pills and the drinks, she finds she likes it, the way this chess almost _hurts_.

-

Fucking Benny is also different. It’s not the haphazard jerky thrusting of a man too high to care or too inexperienced to make a difference.

With Benny, it’s all subtle moves and plays that when the endgame is revealed leaves Beth stuttering, gasping, clutching at his hair.

But Beth has always been a quick study and what she lacks in experience, she makes up for in sheer determination and intuition. She is still more attack, more surprise, more quick moves than subtle seduction, but all the same she soon learns how to make Benny shake and quiver with a few flicks of her wrist, fingers grazing over the board, ready to conquer, to checkmate.

They both have a tendency to leave marks.

-

Benny relishes, delights, is enraptured in the trainer role he’s taken on.

He has no shortage of theory books and game pamphlets from invitationals years past to draw on, to make Beth study, to drill her on over and over, as if he could screw it into her brain.

And he loves to pontificate on the chess world, its flaws and shortcomings and its norms.

He hammers home the mistakes of legends past, the blunders of chess magazines, the unexpected wins from little-known players.

Ostensibly, this is all to make Beth better, the best. Or to make her come into her own as the best.

And Beth believes that part of Benny really does believe this. But she is not naïve enough to think that his ego has receded, will ever recede.

His ego is wounded, beaten, after her win, and she’s not sure if he’s a masochist or a sadist for asking her to New York, but either way she doesn’t miss the flinch of his face or his hands when he realizes he’s lost a game. Perhaps, he isn’t a glutton for pain, though. Perhaps, this is his way of bandaging up the wound, covering it up until skin meets skin again. Maybe it’s his way of claiming the marks on her neck that match the color of her hair, of claiming the indelible marks being left on her brain.

Of course, talks about the Russians and working as a _team_ but she is decidedly unsure if that’s what they are. The Soviets work together, help each other out.

She’s not sure that’s what’s happening here. Sometimes, it seems more like it’s a fight, a clash of wills, of teeth, of lips on lips, tongues and rooks locked in a battle, until they end in bed or a draw, and all that’s discernable is one mangled being, one brilliant mind, one heap of broken bones.

-

He’d told her to forget about sex. Back in Ohio, in that bar, he’d told her to forget about it, reading her lust as plainly as if she’d written it on her skin.

Maybe he’d wanted to keep the lines clear, keep their pieces on their respective sides of the board, like a virginal set, an untouched game.

But the thing about a chess set is that it is meant to be played.

Sometimes she thinks that his missive in Ohio was really a warning. A warning to himself and to her. That the collision of their bodies could only leave a wreckage in its path.

But with the first slide of their lips, the lock of their hips, the trade of their rooks, neither of them can really find it in themselves to care about the internal damage left behind.

-

Beth grows tired of the grandmaster games. She respects them, and yes, she learns from them. But she never quite feels the wins in the way she thinks Benny wants her to.

If Benny is trying to etch something of his into her skin, he will have to try harder.

If she is supposed to bask and awe in the glory of the old games, the old masters, as if they were kings, then someone is surely in for disappointment.

No, she thinks, she’d rather feel the victory, the high of her own wins, would rather form her own kingdom than bow down.

She has always had a penchant for tipping kings, after all.

-

Benny still talks about chess in bed. She was annoyed at first, but now she finds she doesn’t care.

“Pawn to E4,” he says, as he kisses down her torso. She closes her eyes.

“Pawn to E5,” he says as he places light kisses on the insides of her thighs. She thinks of how she’ll get back at him, make his throat bob with want and anticipation as she plays him.

He moves to breathe over her clit. “Knight to F3.” Her fingers grasp at the bedsheets, searching for a king piece.

“Knight to C6,” he says, lapping at her folds, finally. She inhales a sharp breath.

He sucks at her clit and crooks a finger inside her. “Bishop to B5.” Beth reaches for his shoulders, digging half-moon marks into the soft flesh.

No, she can’t really find it in herself to care when Benny’s tongue when he’s tracing the Spanish opening into her cunt like he wants the memory of his touch to stay there for days, a sore spot when she sits to swap her knight for his queen.

-

They go out in the city sometimes, rarely, if only to get some fresh air and a break.

They go to Washington Square Park, where all of the amateurs gather and play and hustle tourists out of their souvenir money.

They make quite a pair, he in his black trench coat, her in her off-white coat. But it is New York and it’s not _that_ odd.

At the park, they don’t play often, preferring to sit on a bench and sip coffee (Benny takes his black, Beth takes hers with cream and sugar), analyzing the moves, or simply playing a game of their own in their heads.

But every so often, they’ll play, each sitting down at the opposite end of the long row of tables, choosing their prey by the man who seems to have made the most money in the past hour, their appetites hungry and their teeth sharp.

They play and they hustle and it’s a game, and yes, it’s about chess (it’s always about chess) but it’s also a game to see which one of them can make the most money before being detected as a chess pro.

Benny likes to seduce his opponents first, pretend he’s just some grungy punk kid from the West side who thinks he’s smart enough to outwit anything and anyone (it’s not far from the truth). He lets them capture a few pawns, a castle, before taking off the gloves, before the knife comes out and he cuts away at remaining pieces, lassoing the king.

Beth takes a different approach. She likes to come out hard and fast, fire licking at her opponent’s heels all the while. She’ll sit perched on the uncomfortable slatted chair, red hair framing her face, hands under her chin, red lipstick pulling into a smile as she destroys her opponent’s defenses with no delicacy.

They leave bodies in their wake, burying cash in their pockets until they draw too big of a crowd or someone recognizes, and then they run, racing back to Benny’s squalid apartment.

-

Beth likes to ride him, a castle gliding easily to overtake a bishop.

“Fuck, Harmon,” Benny gasps out beneath her.

She looks down at him. Benny always looks a little debauched, with his open shirts and messy hair, but beneath her, he looks absolutely _wrecked._ His hair sticks out in all places from where she almost ripped it out while he went down on her, his chest bearing splotches of red a mixture of the press of her palms and her lipstick.

His fingers grip her hips, like a piece he’s not quite sure where to put down, as she chases them into the endgame.

-

She appreciates his help but sometimes she has the urge to light the stupid game pamphlets on fire with her cigarette and remind him that _she_ is the U.S. Champion. That she beat him. And can still beat him.

So sometimes, when she can’t help it, she’ll go off script, flip them over, make a move that’s not in the booklets.

“That’s not the move,” Benny says irritably, eyeing the stray knight.

Beth quirks her eyebrow up, “Isn’t it?” It’s what _she_ would do in the situation. And isn’t that what they’re here to do? Train her, better her, immortalize her?

She tucks her hands under her chin and look at him with her doe eyes, daring him to respond, to thrust back with a play of his own.

He never disappoints.

-

They play in the park on a Sunday and this time, an angry old man they swindled too much money out of yells after them to not come back. They run, racing, competing as always. This time, Beth finds a shortcut. It’s an alley that cuts through an avenue, lined with trash and liable to get you stabbed, but she takes it and shaves three minutes off her time.

Benny usually makes it home first, on account of his longer legs and knowing the city better. (Also, for all his bluster, it does seem like he did actually mean what he said to that college kid about getting in shape).

When she gets there first, she almost doesn’t believe it, looks around for Benny, waits for him to pop out of the shadows. But he doesn’t, and after a minute, she leans against the metal slab that passes for a door, and slouches on it, catching her breath before letting a triumphant smile sneak onto her lips.

Benny appears two minutes later. She relishes in the surprise on his face, the way he pants and his hair sticks to his forehead with sweat.

“Took a shortcut, eh?” he asks between shallow breaths.

She nods. “I always was better at strategy than you give me credit for,” she says.

Benny pulls out his keys and goes to join her by the door. “I give you plenty credit.”

She quirks her eyebrows at that and he pauses his opening the door to lean into her, and she is suddenly aware of the little space between them in the vestibule. She pouts her lips, sure he’s going to kiss her.

And for a moment, he leans in, but his lips don’t go for hers, instead brushing against the shell of her ear, leaving a shiver down her body. “You should get a knife.”

-

Later, when they’re wrapped up in sheets and panting and catching their breath from a different kind of exercise, Beth thinks that she doesn’t need a knife. She is a warning sign all on her own. Surely a man as smart as Benny can see that.

With his mouth running up and down her legs and her hands in his dirty golden hair, she throws her legs over his shoulders, and he takes care to kiss all the way up and for a moment, she thinks, that maybe she is his Achilles’ heel (Achilles was only a half-god, after all). But the thought disappears as she shatters and is reborn.

-

New York is a frenzy, disjointed. New York is the snap and crush of their bodies, Benny’s apartment a mausoleum to chess greats, a slot for Beth’s coffin being carved out, the pawns lined up to pay tribute.

Beth emerges, fractured, bruised, bloodied (but oh, if only her opponents could see the other guy).

And the thing about bones (especially those of the young) is that they heal and they repair and they come out even stronger, with a pill between their teeth and a light in their bloodstream.

She emerges running and ready.

-

_You know the two of us are just young Gods_  
_And we'll be flying through the streets with the people underneath_  
_And they're running, running, running again_

**Author's Note:**

> honestly, I'm not sure what this is, it's messy and disjointed but this song gives me such Beth/Benny vibes (the whole badlands album tbh) and I just can't get it out of my head? And now I'm writing a series of one-shots based on it so...
> 
> (also if anyone is good at video editing, PLEASE make a video of them to this song, I beg you)
> 
> comments majorly appreciated, as always


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